Day 3
This morning we had our first Indonesian language class. We learned colors, numbers, the alphabet, days of the week, the months. Our orientation leader, Dwita, has us go one by one and read off some numbers for her. We all had a pretty good laugh listening to each other try to put the right words in the right order. We would get something like 555,500. Lima ratus lima puluh lima ribu lima ratus. Hard right? If we got it right we got a little candy.
In Balinese culture, families live on a compound for their entire lives. The house you live in on the compound is by status and rank in the family. The eldest member has the house in the north of the compound. The west, the youngest, the south is for guests, and in the center is their temple to preform cremations and also to pray. They even have a separate house for their rice! Balinese eat so much rice that it doesn’t all fit in their kitchen... so they have a special house just for rice.
The men will stay with their families their entire lives. The women they marry leave their families to live with her husbands family. Our driver was asking us how life is back home and if it is the same. We said not quite like that! He found it shocking that us college students at such a young age make our own money and live on our own. Especially being women. It really made me appreciate the jobs that I have and the freedom to be able to live on my own and support myself when the time comes.
Later in the day, we went to our Batik painting lesson. It was held in the back of the instructors compound in Ubud. It was really eye opening to see his home. There were chickens and roosters chasing his children while his wife tending to them. The compound was old and he did not speak any English other than numbers. All of the colors corresponded to a number and if we wanted a certain color paint, we would say which number for him.
Directly after painting, a few of us piled into a car and had our driver take us to Jungle Fish, a resort pool club that I’ve seen on social media and wanted to go find. The entrance fee was 150k IDR. About 11USD! We had two private swinging beds in front of the infinity pool and were treated like queens. Drinks were always full and the food was amazing.
Eventually almost everyone from our house came in by dinner and it ended up being an awesome bonding trip for all of us. I made friends with Alyssa from LA, Tina from New Zealand, and Jo from the UK. We all were talking about why we came on this trip and about our families back home. It is so interesting hearing about their different cultures overseas and the normalities of their lives. I remember talking to Sol from Brazil with a few of the girls and I asked how tall she was. In her Brazilian accent she says, “I don’t know how you say 5 feet something? What is a foot? I only know centimeters!” She also called ounces oozes because of the abbreviation oz. We all laughed so hard trying to tell each other how tall we were and then trying to convert to each other’s measuring system. Today was a good day.